"USA! USA!"

This is from the box of ancient wonders. I love the textures, the paint globs, the gummy stars, all of it. Today seems like an appropriate day to post it, echoing all of the Homer Simpsons at the Republican convention last night. Normally I can't stand to watch any kind of awards show or political convention, anything involving pomp and ceremony. But I was curious to see how Mrs. Palin would perform, what she would say, the whole circus. There were lots of "USA! USA!" chants - which is fine and dandy, but I can't hear that now without imagining a crowd of Homer Simpsons.

I also saw a little bit of Hucklebee's speech and I have to say that school desk parable he spun was one of the effed-uppest stories I have ever heard. In case you missed it (and odds are you did) it goes like this:

A teacher has all of the desks removed from her classroom. As each class comes in the kids are told they can have their desks if they can tell her what they have to do to earn them. As the day wears on, befuddled kids try their luck with answers like "by studying hard?" and "by paying attention". Her answer is always "No, you should do that anyway - but how do you earn your desks?"

Finally at the end of the day she says "Well, no one guessed, so I will tell you: You don't have to earn your desks, because brave men and women went to war and earned them for you! These desks are already paid for, by the blood and sacrifice of the American Soldier!"

What a mess! If you're going to honor the country's veteran's, don't screw it up with a mixed-up tall tale like that!

Cue hemlockman. He'll probably jump in here now with some venom about the republiKKKans, so stand back.

I went to this hippy elementary school where we didn't even have desks! We had to sit on the floor! Obviously the dirty hippies who ran the school had been short-shrifted by the greedy American soldier! I guess while we were learning how to string love beads and pledging allegiance to Mother Russia, the American Soldier was too busy killing babies to give us desks.

I like the way he painted the red stripes and left the color of the paper for the white stripes, but the paper wasn't white enough so he attacked it with bold splattery strokes of white paint with little patches of the paper still showing underneath. ! It's an amazing self portrait of process. A kind of action painting, but with a Jasper Johns flavor. By this time Brigham was still obviously heavily influenced by modernism, but with the ironic use of shiny adhesive stars, it seems as though he was well on his way to his current style. I think I may have read a favorable review by Hilton Kramer in Art Forum of the solo exhibition in which this piece was featured, but I could be wrong.

Later I remember when Brigham abandoned painting for performance art. After several ill-fated collaborations with Laurie Anderson (we all know how THAT turned out) it seemed as though Brigham had dropped out of the scene for a while, (except for the odd appearance at Studio 54), so it's nice to see him back in good form with the recent concert poster gig.

Was that Brigham I saw in Spaggos with David Bowie and Damian Hirst in that photo spread for Vanity Fair? Or did that just LOOK like Brigham?

Having been raised as a proper Southerner, I don't go into another man's house to confound him. Well...not intentionally, anyway.

I know that you are more conservative than I, so why would I step in here and aim expletives at folk whom you may admire? Steve the B's site is another matter. He's a mildly leftish liberal. And uses at least as many curse words as anyone else. So I feel free to yammer away over there. Not so here, where the atmosphere is far more staid.

How were you able to watch the convention? I made a point out of not watching a single instant of either of them. Just a sign, I think, that the older I get, the wiser I become. When I was a kid, I used to watch all of the conventions. But no more. There's not much difference between the two so-called "parties", and so I do my best not to watch each during their week-long uber-propaganda fests.

As for the desk thing - nice try, liberals, but taxpayers do not buy desks so kids can learn to "negotiate" and dance with Kim Jung Il (sp???). Those desks are for kids to hone their carving skills on! You need to know good knifesmanship to gut a caribou in ANWR!

you want a rant? here. i’ll spin a tail related to children and school.

there’s a pie. it gets made every year. let’s call it state tax pie.

everyone in your state who works contributes to this pie, and after it is made the pie gets cut up and distributed.

slices of the pie can be distributed to things that DIRECTLY benefit ALL of the contributors... things like building new prisons to keep bad people off the streets. things like building homes to care for the elderly and infirmed. things like taking care of roads, taking care of pollution, taking care of the state flora and fauna. etc etc etc

slices of the pie can also be distributed to things that DIRECTLY benefit only CERTAIN contributors. one such thing is education. the only people who DIRECTLY benefit from slices of the state tax pie being given to education are people who have children.

how much of your state tax pie goes toward education? where i live it is is over 75% of that pie, and the people who run the school system constantly cry that this 75% portion is not enough.

and yet these parents who are so concerned about THEIR child are unwilling to accept responsibility for THEIR child and pay for its education.

i believe that the world is overpopulated, and that every problem we face today is directly related to overpopulation. it disgusts me that our government rewards and encourages people to add to this problem, and it disgusts me that over 75% of my state taxes are used to benefit these people.

should we have the highest quality of education in the world? - yesshould every child in this country be entitled to a quality education? - yesshould the government regulate the education of children, and ensure that they are receiving the quality education that they are entitled to?- yes

-but-

should the government PROVIDE children with their education? - noshould parents be 100% responsible for providing their children with an education? - yes

i saw a news piece on a japanese company that was making their office more efficient by taking all the chairs out of the conference room. since the people had to conduct meetings standing, up it made meetings go much faster.

also nobody had their own desk. you sat at whatever desk was open.

so we'll have shorter more efficient classes without desks, and maybe the kids can march in place during class, so they'll get in better shape.

"As for the desk thing - nice try, liberals, but taxpayers do not buy desks so kids can learn to "negotiate" and dance with Kim Jung Il (sp???). Those desks are for kids to hone their carving skills on! You need to know good knifesmanship to gut a caribou in ANWR!"

True, but you forgot to mention the gum storage thing, the main use of school desks...

"one such thing is education. the only people who DIRECTLY benefit from slices of the state tax pie being given to education are people who have children."

Ummmm... nope. I have no kids, and I believe I directly benefit from free public education because I don't want to live in a society of uneducated, unemployable adults at any point. As a member of a society, I am responsible to pitch in to make sure that happens.

I want my next-door-neighbor's kid to be well-educated enough to become my heart surgeon in the future, as all the bleedin' I'm doing as a leftist will catch up with me someday!